Introducción

Ibérica
ISSN: 1139-7241
iberica@aelfe.org
Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines
Específicos
España
Hyland, Ken
Projecting an academic identity in some reflective genres
Ibérica, núm. 21, 2011, pp. 9-30
Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos
Cádiz, España
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01 IBERICA 21.qxp:Iberica 13 10-03-11 17:18 Página 9
Projecting an academic identity in some
reflective genres
Ken Hyland
The University of Hong Kong (China)
khyland@hku.hk
Abstract
Research on academic writing has long stressed the connection between writing
and the creation of an author’s identity (Ivanič, 1998; Hyland, 2010). Identity is
said to be created from the texts we engage in and the linguistic choices we make,
thus relocating it from hidden processes of cognition to its social construction
in discourse. Issues of agency and conformity, stability and change, remain
controversial, however. Some writers question whether there is an unchanging
self lurking behind such discourse and suggest that identity is a “performance”
(see for instance Butler, 1990) while others see identity as the product of
dominant discourses tied to institutional practices (Foucault, 1972). All this has
been of particular interest to teachers and researchers of EAP because students
and academics alike often feel uncomfortably positioned, even alienated, by the
conventions of academic discourse. They sometimes complain that the voice
they are forced to use requires them to “talk like a book” by adopting a formal
and coldly analytical persona.
In this paper I want to explore how we construct an identity in three rather
neglected academic genres wh...